partly, because it lay on my road round to Westminster; partly,
because I had a night fancy in my head which could be best pursued
within sight of its walls and dome. And the fancy was this: Are
not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a
dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more
or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our
lives? Are we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we
associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and
empresses, and notabilities of all sorts? Do we not nightly jumble
events and personages and times and places, as these do daily? Are
we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and
do we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just as
these do sometimes in respect of their waking delusions? Said an
afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir,
I can frequently fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could
I – by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, ‘Queen
Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I
dine off peaches and maccaroni in our night-gowns, and his Royal
Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third on
horseback in a Field-Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I refrain from
reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal
parties I myself had given (at night), the unaccountable viands I
had put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conducting myself
on those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master
who knew everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day’s
life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.
By this time I had left the Hospital behind me, and was again
setting towards the river; and in a short breathing space I was on
Westminster-bridge, regaling my houseless eyes with the external
walls of the British Parliament – the perfection of a stupendous
institution, I know, and the admiration of all surrounding nations
and succeeding ages, I do not doubt, but perhaps a little the
better now and then for being pricked up to its work. Turning off
into Old Palace-yard, the Courts of Law kept me company for a
quarter of an hour; hinting in low whispers what numbers of people
they were keeping awake, and how intensely wretched and horrible
they were rendering the small hours to unfortunate suitors.
Westminster Abbey was fine gloomy society for another quarter of an
hour; suggesting a wonderful procession of its dead among the dark
arches and pillars, each century more amazed by the century
following it than by all the centuries going before. And indeed in
those houseless night walks – which even included cemeteries where
watchmen went round among the graves at stated times, and moved the
tell-tale handle of an index which recorded that they had touched
it at such an hour – it was a solemn consideration what enormous
hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were
raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a
pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out
into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow
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the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all
round it, God knows how far.
When a church clock strikes, on houseless ears in the dead of the
night, it may be at first mistaken for company and hailed as such.
But, as the spreading circles of vibration, which you may perceive
at such a time with great clearness, go opening out, for ever and
ever afterwards widening perhaps (as the philosopher has suggested)
in eternal space, the mistake is rectified and the sense of
loneliness is profounder. Once – it was after leaving the Abbey
and turning my face north – I came to the great steps of St.
Martin’s church as the clock was striking Three. Suddenly, a thing